Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Conversations on life, style, beauty, and relationships. It's The Velvet's
Edge Podcast with Kelly Henderson. Okay, Megan Divine. I love
that last name, Divine. Thank you. It's very fancy of you.
It is very fancy. It's very fancy of the immigration
officials when my great grandparents emigrated from Irolent. Yes. Wow,
(00:21):
they haven't really thought highly of your great grand here. Well,
you are a psychotherapist and author. Um. The book is
called It's Okay to Not Be Okay. And I was
just telling you I really feel like our society comes
into grief in a place that like we don't want
to deal and so, um, you know, I've done a
(00:42):
lot of my own personal work where I've been taught
to really try to walk through the pain to get
to the other side, and I think that's been so
important for my personal healing. And I was just researching
a lot on your Instagram and that seems to be
in line with sort of what you think. But I
want to start with basics and then kind of work
through work our way up through that so people can
understand the importance of working through grief and all of
(01:02):
those things. So can you? Is there like a basic
definition for grief that you could even give. I was
thinking here this, Yeah, I mean that any any definition
is going to be too small and reductive, because it's like,
what's a definition of love? Mm hmm? Right, because grief
(01:23):
is part of love, right, whether we're talking about grieving
the death of somebody or a divorce or a separation,
or honestly, like grief from losing a job or a
way of life or a physical body function like m
Grief is the set of emotions that you experience when
(01:45):
you lose someone or something that means something to you, right,
And again, like that's me reaching for a definition, and
you know it's it's I think that correlation there of
like let's define love, well, what kind of love do
you mean? Do you mean romantic? Do you mean familiar?
Do you mean like I love a good burrito? Like?
What do you mean? And and again it's like grief,
(02:11):
grief is part of the human condition. It it hurts
to be alive, right, And I think this is the big,
the big starting point here is that grief is a
normal human emotion. It happens all the time in big
ways and small ways, and as individuals and as a
wider culture. We don't deal with that very well, right, both,
(02:36):
Why why is the big million dollars a million dollar quest? Yeah?
So longer long answers and short answers here. So there's
a long history of avoiding grief, right, And by long history,
I mean we're talking back not just fifty years, but
we're talking centuries. And if you think about it, right,
(02:56):
So let's center let's center on loss related to us
here for a minute, because it makes it makes this
make more sense. Losing someone you love, someone you love dies,
they disappear, they're no longer there. That is a really
that sets off a really big series of emotions and
it's really uncomfortable. Right. But rather than fully let in
(03:21):
the reality that every single person you love or being
you love will die, that is really hard knowledge to
sit with. And so the sort of equal and opposite
reaction there is like, I don't want to feel this
big feeling, So how can I manage it? How can
I control it? How can I shut it down? How
can I um pretend that everything is okay in order
(03:44):
to manage the unpredictable, uncontrollable nature of life. Life is
unpredictable and uncontrollable. You can do everything right and your
baby still dies. You can eat your vegetables, take your vitamins,
drinking of water and still get diagnosed with terminal cancer
when you're twenty one. Right, life is not under our control,
(04:07):
and that is a very hard thing to acknowledge, to
let in. It is much easier in air quotes. Here
I'll can't see me do air quotes, but as much
easier to say, bad things will not happen if I
do X, Y and Z, and if something bad happens anyway,
I can control my feelings so that that sadness and
(04:28):
that grief will not consume me. Right, we are way
more afraid of grief than we are of death, which
is a sort of weird thing to say, but if
you think about it, you can sort of in an
abstract analytical sense, you can understand, like, okay, I will
die eventually. Let me do my advanced advanced directives in
my end of life planning and all of those things
(04:50):
so that I can get those ducks in a row. Fine,
you can be sort of analytical about that. But if
you switch that and you look at your best friend
or your sister and you say they could die anytime.
That is a much harder reality to get in, and
humans will literally do anything to keep from feeling that
(05:14):
future absence. Right. It really sort of sets up this
UM sort of one false move world where you you
have to work really hard to UM to not get
the short end of the stick, right, Like, bad things
won't happen to me if I do all of these
things correctly, and this need to reduce grief to this
(05:40):
five simple steps or seven stages or um you should
be back to happy within six weeks, or there's something
wrong with you, like it's all this way to control
that existential anxiety of your feelings being bigger than you. Honestly,
when you just we're talking about we can handle the
(06:01):
idea of death over grief. That made so much sense
to me simply because there have been times in my
life when the grief is so immense that I feel
like I'm dying but I'm alive, and you almost are
like I just wish I was dead because this is
so encompassing, it is so overwhelming. I don't want to
feel these things. And since I've gone through such a
(06:24):
bad period of that before, I find myself now I'm
relating the death equation to relationships. For me, it's like
I need to do all of these things and be
hyper alert, hyper aware so this relationship doesn't end and
I feel that pain again because I'm like, I can't
go through that again, you know. So do you see
people just constantly trying to sidestep pain, absolutely right, and
(06:49):
internalizing the the I guess the mechanism of action. They're
like just what you described. So in relationships, let me
make sure that I've done all of myself work. Let
me make sure that my boundaries are really here, let
me make sure that I'm communicating, let me make sure
that I'm looking for every potential yellow or red flag
in this new like fucking relentless self examination to make
(07:10):
sure that you are quote unquote doing it right so
that you get the right person, which has the end
result of I never have to lose someone I care
about again, right, Like what an exhausting way of greeting
the world. It's exhausting and again that whole like past fail.
Do it right and you won't ever be in pain again.
(07:30):
Do it wrong and you're shrewd, Like hello, how about
the breadth of human experiences? Actually, between those two poles. Yeah, yeah,
And I think this is all in the framing of
of what pain is, right, what grief is. It is
not a punishment for doing it wrong. Right sometimes relationships
(07:52):
And I had a partner once say you know, our
relationship has been really successful us because it only lasted
three months doesn't mean it wasn't successful. Right, So this
like reframing of what what does success mean in love?
What does success mean in related nous? What does success
(08:12):
mean if we want to bring this back into the
end of life, death, dying, that sort of thing, like
what does success look like for a terminal diagnosis like cancer? Right,
success doesn't always mean you beat that cancer and you live.
Sometimes it means I met this period of my life
(08:33):
with grace and with compassion for myself, with a deepening
of the relationships that surround me. Right, If we are
not looking to the erasure of all pain as our
success metric, we can start looking at the things that
actually make life better, which is better relationships, better connections,
(08:54):
better advocacy for ourselves and for others. Like, if you
stop trying to ward it off all pain, you get
to have life, which is kind of cool. Um, As
I'm listening to that that I'm like, but how do
you get past the fear? Because if the pain is
so great, why would we ever want to sign up
for that? Again? Yeah, it's a super good question, right,
(09:16):
and really really valid. So again, like we're talking relationships,
we're also talking death, right, right. If you think about like, um,
you know you have an intense experience of loss where
your you know, your brother died or your mom died
or your partner died. Knowing what that experience is like,
(09:37):
it's really tempting to say I never want to get
close to anyone because it's not worth it. And honestly
that's valid. That's valid. I'm never going to tell you,
you know, suck it up and don't do that, because
every response that you make in your own grief, as
long as you're not harming others, is valid. Right. We
(09:57):
we rush in and say like no, no, no, it
is worth it all of these things, and honestly, side note,
it is worth it. We'll get there in a second.
But I want to get into this practice of not
rushing yourself out of your of your pain impulse to
say I never want this again. Right, if you silence
that part of you too, quickly. It's just going to
(10:20):
keep popping up in places, so we want to acknowledge
that that is a really valid response to intense pain,
to not want it again. One of the things that
my team and I have been talking about a lot
is we're noticing a theme for on like social media comments,
comments about the It's Okay book or they're writing your
(10:40):
grief course or any of those things where people are saying,
I don't feel brave enough to do this yet, I
don't feel brave enough to read this book. Yet, I
don't feel ready or strong enough to write about my grief.
And it reminds me of this. This phrase that I
hear a lot and have heard a lot for for
a long time now is I'm afraid if I start crying,
I'll never be able to stop. Right. There is this
(11:04):
sense of emotions will consume me, and the really unfortunate
part of that is that, um, we how do we
want to say this? It's sort of a chicken or
chicken or the egg type situation here, because the ways
(11:25):
that we have historically culturally dealt with big emotions like
grief m is to clean them up, put them behind.
You don't look so sad, put on a happy face,
behave as normal, get back to life, all of these
things that we that we've been trained were supposed to
do when we're sad. I think that a really big
foundational part of us knows you can't treat sadness like that.
(11:47):
You can't treat grief like that. It will not comply. Right.
So it makes sense when you when you start edging
towards real feeling, there's some part of your mind that says,
we have no tools for the ship, like there is
nothing except for the gaping, yawning void if I enter
this right, so X sort of makes us double back
(12:10):
on like, Nope, grief is a problem. Not going to
feel it, not going to do anything that might set
it off. I will love no one, I will do
nothing right. This is why it's so important to one
talk about the reality of grief, which is the reality
of love, and to talk about what we really need
inside those big emotions, which is not solutions for how
(12:31):
to get out of those emotions or erase those emotions,
but how do you survive inside them? What are the
tools that you need right? What are the more in there? Yeah?
I mean this, I feel like this is sort of
the foundation of all of my work, right, like what
tools do you need? In the abyss. Most of our
cultural responses, clinical, medical responses, entertainment storyline responses to grief
(12:54):
are get out of that ship faster. And for me,
the real question here is what do you do when
you're in it? Right? We have to be able to
um combat combat the idea that you have to get
out of it quickly. It's like I am going to
feel these big things, I am going to feel consumed
by it. It is overwhelming. What do I do? Right?
(13:16):
In the book, I talk about the difference between pain
and suffering. Right, what you and I are talking about
right now is is pain. Pain just is it will
be there no matter what, right, Like losing someone you
love is hard and it hurts, just true m hm.
(13:37):
Suffering is all of the stuff we put on top
of ourselves and that others put on top of us
in top of that pain, like all of that questioning
that you were talking about with like ship, Like I
didn't pick the right person, I didn't do my own
self work, I wasn't clear I did this, I missed
this sign Like that is suffering, right, And that's what
sort of like twists you into knots and makes it
really really difficult to find your bearings inside the core
(14:01):
pain of that reality, which is something that meant something
to me. Left the relationship that I had is not
the relationship I thought I had, and that hurts. Right.
Finding ways to name the pain itself and then support
yourself inside that pain is a very different process than
trying to be a sleuth for sadness or a sleuth
(14:24):
for flaws in what you did to cause this or
what the other person did to cause this. Right, It's
really different. That's so good because to me, I think
a way I try to find my way out of
pain is to do exactly that. Like if I just
investigate and I figure this out, you know, I figure
out exactly what happened, or I mean, it could be anything,
(14:46):
it could be job related, all of these things. You know,
I think there could be grief in a lot of
different places in our lives. But if I can figure
it out, get the right answer, read enough books, I mean,
I will, you know, I'll just read the ship out
of everything around me. Um, then I can get out
of this and avoid it in the future, Like it
(15:07):
won't last as long and I won't go through it again,
and it's just not happening. It's not happening. And it's
not that self reflection and learning is not helpful. It
is super helpful. But let's look at why you're doing it, right.
If you're doing it to stop feeling what you're feeling
and avoid all pain forever in the future, it's not
(15:30):
that it's right or wrong. It's that it's ineffective, right, right,
Those are not effective approaches to grief. It's not it's
not really respectful to your own self either, right. So,
I think one great question is when you're when you're
finding yourself in that sort of inside your own inside
your own mind, is to like stop, take a beat
(15:53):
and ask yourself, like, you know, some some really good
questions here might be things like, oh, I'm doing that
thing where I'm in pain of some kind, and I
jump to where did I fail? And how can I
avoid this later? What would feel useful or supportive to
(16:13):
the way that I'm feeling right now? Right? That sounds
a little bit therapist to speak, but there's good reason
for That's because it's helpful. Right, You're interrupting that self
flagellation cycle, which is just a way to avoid pain.
But the pain is there. So let's actually name what's
going on in that situation. Is, Oh, I'm doing that thing,
(16:34):
doing that thing, and that means that tells me that
I'm actually feeling grief or I'm feeling pain, or I'm
feeling sadness. Right, name your own situation back to yourself,
I am feeling this, Okay, what would feel supportive in
this moment? Given that this is how I'm feeling. My
guess is when you ask yourself that question and give
(16:56):
yourself a second to respond, you're going to answer yourself
and it's not going to be go do some research. Right,
Just interrupting that habitual pain avoidance self flatillation is going
to be amazing. But let's go back to you know,
I write books, so I don't want people to stop
(17:18):
going to books for support and resources out there, boks
out there. But let's look at let's look at the
equation in your head. They're like, you can ask yourself.
Like so one of my one of my friends and colleagues,
Kate can Fail to a relationship and communication educator, has
this great question. She says, do you need a solution
(17:39):
or do you need support right now, and I usually
talk about that with like, as a support person, you
can ask your friend, your family member, you know, when
you're listening to them talk about their feelings, to ask like,
do you need solutions and problem solving right now or
do you just need to them this ship? You can
ask yourself that question too. Is this a time where
(18:01):
I really need to make a decision and therefore I
need some help figuring out what the next steps are?
Or do I need space to just let this suck
right now? Do I need support around my emotions or
do I need to go into sort of logic and
analysis and find some specific tools to help me do X,
Y and Z. Right, It's like, no, what results are
(18:23):
you looking for? And let's like use the tools that
will get you there. Knowing that it's really tempting to
say I will find exactly the right tools so that
I stopped feeling this and will never feel it again
in the future, that is not going to happen. So
let's just name that. Yeah, you mentioned earlier at the
stages of grief and you said, you know a lot
(18:44):
of times I think that is how people talk about grief.
It's like you have these stages, and it can easily
get very mapped out, right, Like you go through wine,
then you go through the next one, you go through
the next. In my experience, had a mentor describe at
one time as a corkscrew, like you're not going to
just go through anger one day and then never go
through anger. Like it's not linear grief, it's it's a corkscrew,
(19:05):
and it's just kind of this constant rotation. Each day
can vary and you kind of don't really know. It's
kind of unpredictable. Um, can you talk through the stages
of grief and maybe how people experience those differently, how
it's not so cut and dry so that we can't
map it out or plan it out kind of like
what we're talking about. Yes, so first, there are no
(19:29):
stages of grief. Okay, we'll do a little tell us
more because what this is like the sacred that. Okay,
so here's here's the thing. Everybody knows, this knows the
stages of grief. So one that like that, that points
to an excellent marketing campaign because everybody knows the stages
of grief, even if they can't remember where they first
(19:51):
learned them, they are everywhere So the stages of grief
were created in the sixties by Dr Elizabeth Coobler Ross,
and she created them actually in response to what she
saw with her patients who had just received a terminal diagnosis.
So originally those five things not stages. Yet those five things,
um were feelings and experiences that somebody who had just
(20:14):
received a terminal diagnosis might experience. They were really common things.
She never meant them to be linear, she never meant
them to be required, and she never actually applied them
to grief. She applied them to dying. There's one thing right,
like poof mind blown literally, Yeah, so what happened though
(20:39):
earlier you and I were talking about um, you know
how far back does this avoidance of grief and pain go?
Wherever the medical and clinical world jumped on her stages
of grief, which she meant as a comfort and a
kindness and a support to people who were facing the
end of their lives, it got twist did into this
(21:01):
prescriptive solution, here are these things that you will go through.
Because we really like certainty, we really like solutions. We
really like to be able to look at somebody who's
mom just died and say, you're gonna be done with
this really really soon. Right, So those five feeling states
that are common or normal, I guess I would say
(21:21):
these days, um for for people facing the end of
their lives, got packaged into five distinct stages that you
must go through when you are grieving. You must go
through them in order. Um And the end stage and
stage in air quotes is acceptance. And by the time
you reach acceptance, you are back to normal. Your grief
(21:44):
doesn't really bother. You might think of your person fondly
every once in a while, but you've moved on with
your life. Also sidebar on here, anger is one of
those stages. And unlike some of the other kinder gentler stages,
anger is one that you need to move through really
quick because it's uncomfortable for people. So like you're in
the A R phase, you need to get out of
that one and move on to acceptance, right, you know.
(22:06):
The one of the one of one of the many
problems with this is that you as a grieving person,
you can't win. Right If you're talking to a friend
or a family member or your neighbor over the fence
and you say, like, I just can't believe they're gone.
And they say, oh, that's the denial phase. You've got
to get through that one. Or if you have taken
(22:29):
off your wedding bands after your partner dies and somebody says,
don't you think you're doing that too fast? You really
need to like spend some time with you know, um
accepting it or bargaining or whatever. Like from the outside,
you're going to get so much judgment and so much
correction on where people think you are in those fictitious stages,
(22:51):
why you're doing things the way that you're doing and
maybe you missed a stage and you didn't do it
well enough, so now you're back at the beginning. Like
it is such garbage, and it's really cruel if we
think about grief as part of love, which I always
do because it is, you don't put love in those
kinds of stages, right love. My my favorite phrase that
(23:16):
I've written about the stages of grief is that they're
they're a net thrown over a fog bank, right. It's
an attempt to control, define, and corral something that is
uncontainable and undefinable. Dr Ross meant what turned into the
(23:38):
five stages as grief as a way to normalize a
wholly unnormal, abnormal situation. Right, she meant them as a
as a dog is voicing her support. Yes, she meant
them as a as a comfort, not a cage for people.
(24:01):
But because of two things. One, because however the medical
professions talk about grief, trickles down to everybody else. Right,
this is why the stages of grief are so pervasive,
because it's started with the clinical world and moved out
into pop culture and the entertainment world and all of
these things. Um. But also that desire from both the
professionals and average humans to want to feel like we
(24:25):
have some control. We may not be able to always
control laws, but by God's we will control grief. Right.
And the other thing is, you know, very often I'm
talking to people who want to be supportive of a
grieving friend or family member, um, and they don't know how,
and they feel helpless and stupid, or they've said something
that they think is just like, oh my gosh, I
(24:47):
can't believe I said that. I'm such a jerk. And
it's like, it's it's not your fault if you don't
know how to talk about grief. It's not your fault.
If you don't know how to support yourself or somebody
else who's going through grief. You have been trained in
the incorrect, ineffective ways of doing it, So it's not
your fault, and it is your responsibility to learn better, kinder,
(25:13):
more effective ways to navigate grief for yourself and for
others once you know that the old ways are actually
causing harm. So, speaking of old ways, have you noticed
in your practice a difference between how men and women
(25:34):
process grief? Because I think so much of the programming
for men, you know, back in the day was no feelings,
no emotions, that makes you weak. And so I've witnessed
a lot of men in my life really struggle when
they're in a place of grief, for instance, or any
sort of sadness and pain, and just really kind of
go to the place of avoidance more than I see
(25:56):
women doing. And that's a generalization obviously, but sure, sure,
I mean, any any descriptions of gender based responses are
going to be over generalizations, um for several reasons. People
are all individuals, gender as a spectrum, all of those things.
So having said that, I think we can um sort
of drill into that a little bit. Certainly, what I
(26:19):
see very often is that, Um, for men and male
identified folks who are a grieving they feel like they
have to be strong for the rest of their friend
group or the rest of their families. So for for
people who have lost a child or lost a baby,
the male male or this is gonna get clunky if
I have to say this every time male or male identified,
(26:41):
so we're just gonna say male or men for shorthand. Um,
the man feels like he has to be strong for
the rest of the family, has to be the provider,
the you know that that night in shining Armor. Cultural
myth runs deep, right, Like you have to perform this,
(27:02):
You have to be there for other people. You have
to be the one that everybody leans on. Right. Parents
often feel this for their grieving kids too, But it
certainly does show up for men very often. And again
we go back to like, what does our cultural storyline say?
What does most of our entertainment say? Right, Like, the strong,
(27:23):
attractive male is the one who fits for certain body
type and who sits fits a certain um emotional stoicism. Right,
they are able to take charge and care for care
for people by being logical and analytical and not letting
things get them down. If we see somebody who is
showing emotion, um, that makes them somehow less masculine. Right,
(27:48):
It just I mean this is when we talk you know,
I talk often about like the intersections of misogyny and grief,
and that's also a fascinating topic. But we also look
at the ways that toxic masculine and um and misogyny
impacts everybody along the gender spectrum. Right, not allowing men
(28:10):
to share their feelings openly means that we miss the
related nous we most long for. Right if you talk
to women in in heterosexual relationships, you talk to women
and they're like, I just wish my partner would open
up to me more. Okay, the mail in that hetero
relationship here that we're talking about, the mail might be
(28:30):
like I wish I could talk about my feelings, but
I need to be strong here. Right, we are missing
each other. And this is true in friend groups and
family systems, all of these things. Like we're missing what
we most want, which is connection and being seen for
who we truly are. And this is a huge juggernaut
and a you know, multifaceted problem to solve in here
(28:52):
about like how do we kick over toxic masculinity. How
do we like make things better for everybody? And I
think this this comes back to what kind of conversations
are you having with the people in your life? Right?
How do we bring curiosity into our relationships? What that
might look like? So you know, if if you have, uh,
(29:13):
you know, a male friend in your life, you can
open a conversation and say, you know, I've been thinking
a lot about grief and the way that we express
it and about how sometimes women feel differently about griefs.
So like, what what's grief been like for you in
your life? How do you you know? You want it
to sound like you and not like me. But I
think you can open conversations about each person's experience of
(29:38):
grief in a way that starts to foster real communication
and real relatedness. Right. The way that we change the
cultural script for men around grief is starting with being
curious about men's experience in our own lives. You don't
change the culture usually from some giant, top down edict
(30:01):
that happens. It really does happen. Like any social change,
cultural change is person to person in relationships, being curious
about each other and being willing to not talk each
other out of what you say. Right, that's a super
big like habit for people. So if I'm talking to
somebody in my life and I am curious about gender
(30:24):
differences in the grief experience, and I asked a question about,
what's it like for you as a man. You know,
your dad just died, and um, do you feel like
it's different being a guy experience and your dad's lost
versus your sister's experience. And if they come back with like, yeah,
I actually feel this and this, and we come back
(30:45):
with like, but you know what, you know, you're really
strong though, and everybody relies on you, right, Like, what
did we just do? We just like cemented that narrative
of men need to be strong. So really being open
and curious and reflecting somebody's reality back to them, That's
that's how we um make real connections, that's how we
(31:07):
build relationships, and it's also how we start to kick
over that sort of tired house of gender roles and
pain avoidance. Yeah, that's so good about reflecting someone's reality
back to them. I also is just thinking if you're
also going through grief, how uncomfortable that maybe because you
also are relying on their strength or there, whatever it
(31:28):
is that you project that person to be. If they're
not there, then you're actually alone in your grief, which
is actually something you talk about on your Instagram. You
say we are alone in our grief. And when I
read that, it was the first time anyone has ever
said that very clearly or that I've read very clearly. Um,
(31:50):
and I believe it to be true. It has been
my experience. And not in a way of we don't
have support, we don't have great friend groups, you don't
even have you know, like loved one, are any people
who care about us? But in the capacity of at
the end of the day, if you are grieving, you
are in all of those emotions alone. I mean, they're
yours to process, they are yours to go through. So
(32:12):
can you talk through a little bit about that, because
I don't think that that would be what people want
to hear. No, it isn't, and I I often say
things people don't want to hear. It's it's sort of
my favorite thing. I wanna I want to piggyback that
to what you just said about, like, well, basically, we'll
should I can't open that kind of conversation with my
male friends or male partner, UM, because then I won't
(32:33):
be able to rely on them. So that's sort of
a black or white thinking right there, Like, you can
either be stoic and strong and quote unquote there for me,
or I can allow you to UM share your true
emotions with me, and therefore I lose all of your support,
right like, M that's not the only two options right there.
If we think that there are only those two options,
were screwed. Yeah, the reality there is that UM, you
(32:56):
can actually lean on each other better with more skill,
with more satisfaction for each party. If you're having honest
conversations about what it's like, you can say things like, UM,
you know, I want to know what it's like for you,
and I'm a little bit worried that, UM, I won't
be able to rely on you if I feel like
(33:18):
it's it's sort of causing you harm. But it's important
for us to talk about that. Can we talk about it? Right?
In the therapy world, we call those process discussions where
you're talking about how you talk about something versus So
it would be like, UM, arguing about who does the
dishes correctly or not correctly is a regular argument, And yeah,
(33:39):
I'm looking at my sync right now, and a process conversation,
and a process conversation would be um, I've noticed that
we always get into arguments about who does the dishes better?
Can we talk about how we're going to manage our differences?
That's a process conversation versus like a I can't think
of the other phrase that I use, but process conver
(34:00):
stations are really helpful if you're concerned that you're gonna
lose support from somebody, if you have an honest conversation
about how they're really feeling, think about what goal you
want there, Like, the goal is that I want to
feel really connected inside of this. I want to feel
like we can support each other. I want to feel
like we have each other's backs. Well. In order to
do that, you have to have some really honest, uncomfortable,
(34:20):
awkward conversations, right, Yeah, be awkward and do it anyway,
and then we're going to come into your Your next
question was like or your next thing that you want
to talk about is like you are on your own
in this ship. That is just true, And it doesn't
matter that you've got an amazing support team or a
partner or a therapist or all of these things, Like
(34:42):
the reality of grief is yours, right, Only only you
know how this loss affects you. Only you have the
breadth of history and intimacy that you shared with that person.
You can't just gribe that to someone else. You might
(35:02):
want to, because you want somebody to be there with you,
but you lost a unique person and a unique relationship
or a unique being. Some people are, you know, listening
here having lost a dog or you know whatever. And
I don't want to leave anybody out in the way
that we're talking about this. That the truth is that
no matter what or who you've lost, there is an
(35:24):
intimate vocabulary there that only you speak, right. No one
can join you in that. And what we very often
say to somebody going through any kind of loss is
you're not alone. That's not really true, and it's not again,
we don't go black or white here, we don't go
all this all that, Like those binaries don't really work
(35:48):
for being human one all one thing or all the other.
It is very very important to have support inside and
alongside whatever you're going through. Companionship is how we survive. Yes,
Companionship is really really important. This is why I talk
so much about how to be a better supporter and
how to be a better friend and all of these things,
(36:09):
and no one is going to take the pain away
from you. Your path, your way forward is going to
be built by you alone, right, And in some ways
I feel like that's a really empowering thing to understand.
It means that you don't have to describe every minute
(36:31):
filament of everything to somebody else so that you don't
feel so lonely. Right, there is a core to your
own being that nobody else will ever touch, even the
person who died. Yeah, it's almost like holding it in
a sacred space in some ways. I mean because I
was listening thinking, that's another thing that I think I'd
(36:52):
do in an in an attempt to avoid the pain
of grief maybe is to overtalk it, like over talk
this situation, what happened if there was a loss, like
a person just every single thing about I don't know,
their life, their death, they're all of it, and it's
just like for me, I don't know if it's like
(37:13):
in relationships, a lot of times it can feel like
the case building is going to save me from the
pain because if I could just prove that this was
you know, a certain way it's not going to hurt
is bad, and that's just not true either. It's still
I think it's also a way to justify your own feelings, right,
whether you're doing it to yourself or you're doing it
(37:33):
to somebody else. And again, like this is yet another
part of that grief averse culture. We judge and shame
and harass and dissect um everything about the human experience
of grief. Right the medical model currently, because it's still
(37:53):
funked up. The medical model right now says that if
you are still sad, um, having a time re engaging
with life thinking about your person six months after your
person died, um, you're doing it wrong. Six months six months.
It used to be six weeks, and some some real
grassroots pushed back, I know, made it six months. Um.
(38:16):
There was an article that came out in the New
York Times just yesterday that heavily references so called complicated grief,
and it actually says ten percent of people won't be
better after six months. I'm like, you fucking bastards, do
better research. No one is better after six months after
(38:36):
somebody important to them dies, No one, right, And so
that sort of misinformation disinformation campaign comes from that problem
solution orientation. So it makes sense that when you're having
emotions like grief or you know, big big emotions like sadness,
we do things to defend our own feelings to ourselves
(38:57):
and to defend our experience to others. Whether somebody is
being actively judgmental or not. The general sort of soup
that we're all swimming in is judgmental against the human experience, right,
So I love that question. We we talked about this earlier,
where like when you recognize you or what did you say?
Case building? I love that when you recognize that your
(39:18):
case building to yourself, the practice there is to interrupt it. Go, oh,
I'm I'm case building. Usually I'm case building because I'm
having a big emotion that I want to amat that
I want to manage what am I feeling right now?
Right interrupting your go to mechanisms from managing emotions and
(39:41):
asking yourself, what do I actually need right now? What
am I feeling? What are some other ways that I
might um support myself when I feel lonely other than
um case building to defend the validity of this feeling. Yes, that,
because I think we also can come from our I
I personally have been taught I'm a big feeler, and
(40:02):
so that is too much. I'm doing air quotes too
much for some people, and so grief even comes, you know,
happiness comes in big waves. Grief comes in big waves,
and it's it's almost gotten to a place where, Um,
I don't want to talk about what I feel a
lot of times to people because because it's embarrassing if
you're like, yeah, I'm not over that yet or being
(40:25):
of that. You know, like, is there a line where
it becomes dangerous to live in our grief or is
it just person to person you have to kind of
go through the experience yourself. That's a good question. Um, First,
I would say that if the people are around you
are uncomfortable with you being yourself, yeah, they're not your people. Yeah.
(40:51):
And I think especially for women, sometimes we've been taught that, um,
being emotional, any kind of showing any kind of emotion
is being too much or is being needy? Right, Like,
think about the fact that calling somebody needy is an insult.
Humans need each other right biologically, relationally, emotionally. We need
(41:14):
each other to survive. So having needs is not a
fucking insult right, having emotions and expressing them in the
ways that actually suit you and who you are in
the world. That's not wrong, right, So I just want
to frame that and put that out there that, like,
(41:35):
we very often self sensor based on what we think
other people are thinking about who we are fundamentally right.
If you're not sure and you want to ask people,
you can have a process conversation with your best friend
and you can say, you know what I noticed. I
noticed that I stopped myself whenever I'm like in a
really good mood because I'm concerned that my joy is
(41:58):
a little overwhelming for you? Is that true? Ending that
statement with is that true? Is really important because it
opens conversation. It gives your best friend an opportunity to say,
there's a reason you're my best friend because I fucking
love how extravagant you are with joy. Right. It lets
(42:19):
you actually um name your concerns and find out sort
of feeling out into like, is it actually safe to
be me in the situation? Cool? Okay, I'm going to
do it right. Instead of that narrative that many of
us have, which is I'm too much, I'm too much,
I'm too much tone it down, right. That is something
(42:40):
that is taught to very many people that who you
are at your core um is too much for others. Right,
So that's that's a really great place for self reflection.
And where did I learn this? What does this mean?
What happens when I'm believing that what actions do I take?
What relationships do I want? When I'm believing that who
I am is too much for every buddy? Right, that's
(43:00):
a whole therapy thing in of itself. That's a great
tax to follow though. Um, and I probably forgot your
actual question. Your actual question was I got you. I
got you. Your question was like, when is the normal
experience of grief? When does it cross over into quote
unquote dangerous territory? So, uh, just a reminder here that
(43:23):
normal healthy grief hurts. It is messy, it is overwhelming,
it is confusing you. Your memory might be impacted, your
sleep is definitely going to be impacted. You might feel
more anxious, you might be forgetful, you might not be
able to read more than a paragraph at a time.
All of those things are normal healthy grief. They are uncomfortable,
(43:49):
and they're normal. A lot of the questions that I
get from friends and family members clinicians is like, okay,
but when is it a problem? We really want to know,
like how much is too much? When do we stop it? Um?
Really dangerous territory is health and safety. Right, somebody is
(44:17):
harming themselves or harming others, they are actively suicidal. There
are also things like, um, somebody has completely stopped eating,
or they're they've lost so much weight that it becomes
a medical issue. Right. So dangerous territory for me is
health and safety in the physical dangerous zone. Right. Just
(44:39):
because an emotion is messy, just because somebody is crying
at the grocery store, Just because somebody um is air
quotes still talking about their person predominantly six months, eight months,
a year later, that's not dangerous. That's grief, right. But
we want to look at things like, um, are they
taking risk that are endangering themselves or others? Right? Those
(45:02):
sorts of things. Now, you might have concerns about your person,
and your concerns are valid. There is a way to
phrase those concerns that doesn't shame in silence the person
you're talking to. So that might look like, um, um,
I'm not really sure how to talk about this, but
I have some concerns. Um, I've noticed that you've lost
(45:24):
a lot mount I honestly, I wouldn't talk about somebody's
weight because that's really fucking touchy. I might say something like, UM,
I haven't seen or heard from you in seven or
eight days, and I want to respect your privacy, but
I'm also really concerned about your safety. Can we talk
about that? Yeah? Right? UM, I know that losing somebody
(45:45):
this close to you can really make you feel like
not being part of the world anymore. I want you
to know that it's okay to talk to me if
you feel like you just want to stop waking up
or you actually are thinking about harming yourself for killing yourself, right,
I want you to know that you can talk to
me about that, you can voice your concerns in such
a way that leave the person feeling supported and seen
(46:08):
instead of silenced. Right. And that is going to be
working on your own discomfort level, or your own comfort
level with being uncomfortable and reminding yourself or learning that natural,
normal grief is not tidy. It's not it's not tidy,
and there's nothing wrong with that. Right. So have you
(46:34):
seen because I feel like this last year, just during
the pandemic. I mean, it was a collective trauma, a
collective amount of grief happening. And I know I'm thinking
specifically amongst my friend group, it was hard sometimes because
we all had so many losses happening that there wasn't
that that stable person to kind of you know, that
(46:55):
you could like lean on, or we all had shipped,
and so I think you sort of felt like, odd,
I can't go to this person with that because they
don't have the capacity. Um, do you have any tips
for maybe now that we're starting to somewhat seemingly come
out of this, how do we adjust how do we
support our people, especially if we ourselves have gone through
(47:17):
a lot of loss and collective grief this last year. Yeah,
it's a great question. So very often when I do interviews, UM,
people ask me if I think this pandemic has made
us better at grief, And my answer is none. Um,
it hasn't made us better at grief because I don't
(47:38):
think we've really started talking about what grief really is
and what's needed. I mean, this is again going back
to that hideous New York Times article where they're pathologizing
grief like that is still the medical model. No matter
how hard I try to flip that ship over. UM,
that sort of prevailing cultural belief that you need to
get over things very quickly. Um, that is a strongly
(48:02):
held belief. So I think what's happened over the last
year plus because of the pandemic is because everyone is
grieving something. I think what's actually happened is that more
of us have understood or have realized that the ways
we habitually respond to grief or wrong. Let me see
if I can say that a little bit more sustinctively.
(48:23):
Like human beings don't change behavior until it's personal. That's
not right, not wrong, It is just the way that
the human brain works, right, Like, you don't take action
on something if it doesn't affect you personally. Half the
time you don't even know it's an issue, and the
other half of the time it's like, it's not broken,
why fix it? And then you experience it and you're like,
oh wow, And what's happened. What's happened over during the
(48:45):
course of this pandemic is that everybody has lost something,
from the loss of daily routine to the loss of career,
to loss of a job, to loss of humans and
loss of relationships, to the loss of sense of normalcy.
Everybody has lost something and so now it's personal. You
sort of reach for those old platitudes and you realize
(49:06):
that they're nothing, that they're irrelevant at best and rude
and harmful at worst. Right, So what's happened is this
sort of from my perspective, a cultural awakening to the
fact that the ways we deal with grief are seriously
broken and we need to do something different. I don't
know that we have yet started wondering what we can
(49:28):
do differently. So um, and then your your other question
and they're about like we didn't have I didn't have
the bandwidth to support other people because I was dealing
with my own stuff. And now that we're sort of
coming out of this in a lot of ways, like
how am I going to be there and talk about
this and support my friends when I'm still hobbling around
(49:50):
with my own stuff and I'm going to come back
to we name the situation, right, you name the awkwardness
in the room, You name the difficulty. So that means
like going to your friends individually or as a cohort group,
if that's the way your role and saying you know
this year has been really hard for me, and I
know for all of us, and I want to be
(50:11):
there for you, and I also need to lean on you,
and I don't know how we're going to do this,
Like maybe there's some way to time share emotional support
between us. I love the time share approach because it
doesn't prioritize any one person's grief or experience than the others. Like, oh,
Sally over here got divorced and that's really shitty and
they need that support. But this person lost both parents
(50:33):
and a grandparents, So we need to, like Marshal, like,
there's sort of this sorting hierarchy that happens. And the
reality is that within a cohort group, UM, everybody needs everybody.
So first of all, let's name that, and UM, I
really need support today. Do you have the bandwidth right
now to um? Let me vent about this right And
(50:57):
So what we're talking about here is the developing relationships
where you can say that, where you can say, I
know you're going through some ship right now and I
don't want to lean on you, UM, and I really
need your ear on X, Y and Z. Do you
have time later today to talk about it? Yeah, that's
step one. Step two, however, is super duper important, and
(51:19):
this is cultivating relationships where it's okay for your friend
to say I don't have it in me today. Right.
It needs to be okay for your friends to say
no and not have it be a big issue. Right.
What we're doing here is we're making bids for connection.
We're stating what we need. We're asking if that other
(51:40):
person is available to meet those needs and making it
okay for them to say no, I cannot, and know
that you will be okay and you will go to
the next person who might be able to meet those needs. Yeah.
Those are high level relational communication skills. Yeah. Right, that
is the bar to aim for, the goal to aim for,
(52:01):
and um, you know very often we talk about this
in grief. Right, it's like, well, the grieving person needs
to say what they need and ask for it and
like be proactive. We say the same thing to people
of color, right, like you need to tell me why
what I said was racist? Like, you know, the person
at the center of suffering does not need to educate
(52:22):
everybody around them, So that is not going to happen.
It is important to the best of your capacity and
ability at the time to articulate what you need from
the people closest to you. However, most people don't say
what they need in the best of times. So when
ship has gone sideways, asking the person in pain to
(52:45):
figure out what they need, figure out who might be
able to meet that need, ask for what they need,
that's that's not going to happen. So the way that
you prepare for things like this is to build those
kinds of relationships where you can do that on the
low level things so that in the event that ship
really goes sideways, these skills, these communication skills are not
(53:08):
new to you, right. For some people, they have the
kind of friendships where you can just be like, life
is ship, May I vent to you and the other
person can say, I can listen to your venting at
four pm today? Is that okay? Right? But that is
through trial and error, that is through trust building, that
is through validating and honoring each other's experiences, And you
(53:30):
can do that every single day so that that muscle
memory gets in there. Like pre pandemic, I used to say,
like you you get a chance to practice this your
your ways of responding to pain. Let me start over
on that one because I was just about to be
super incoherent. At least I catch it right. But there's
(53:51):
this exercise that I talk about called pain spotting. Right.
We hear pain all the time, we just don't recognize
it as pain. So if you want the kind of
relationships where you can talk about what's really going on
for you, where you can talk about these awkward, messy
interpersonal things, you've got to practice on small ships. So
let's say you are at in line at the coffee shop, Um,
(54:14):
and you asked the barista how their day is going,
and they say, not that great. The dog was sick
all night. Um, I didn't sleep very well, so I'm
kind of out of it and I got here late.
Now the boss is piste off and somebody called out sick.
What we usually say habitually, instinctively is at least the
sun is out. It's it's so true. And you just
you just missed your daily practice session, right, you just
(54:40):
missed a chance to practice new communication skills. What's a better,
more effective thing to say in that situation is that
all sounds really shitty. I'm sorry that happened. That's all
you gotta do. Yeah, right, that's all you gotta do.
You just acknowledge what the person said, you reflect it
(55:00):
back to them. Acknowledgement is a really powerful relational tool.
And if you get in the habit of interrupting your
impulse to fix ship or make it better for somebody
and instead practice validating and acknowledging what they're going through,
that is going to be that much easier when things
really go sideways, when somebody's baby dies two days before
their due date, or your friend just got into a
(55:22):
car accident and they've lost the use of their legs
and now they're like, am I supposed to do? Right?
Practice acknowledging and validating what somebody is going through without
trying to talk them out of it. Practice on the
small things so that in the event that bigger things
show up, it is not completely new. Right, We have
a I hate to use the word opportunity because you know,
(55:45):
people pair opportunity in crisis all the time. It's garbage,
blah blah blah. But we do have an opportunity right
now because we have had this shared experience of loss
over the last year, two start having conversations about how
are we going to talk about loss moving forward? Right
(56:05):
This year has been really hard. I know it was
hard for you and it's hard for me. Um, what
would feel really like what do you want to what
do you want to talk about? Like do you want
to talk about how weird it is to be going
out into public? Do you want to talk about how
how scary it is to think about meeting new people
and having like not only if you going out into
(56:25):
the dating world, Like not only do you have to
talk about safer sex practices, but you also have to
talk about your vaccination status. Like how are we going
to talk about this stuff? There's so much stuff to navigate,
and just getting into the habit of talking about what
is actually happening is really the way to start. It's
like the Rosetta stone to navigating all of this stuff
(56:45):
is like, let's talk about what's actually in the room
and practice validating and reflecting back rather than fixing things
for each other. Yeah. I love that because I think
that goes to you know, the image I get a
lot of times with grief and people not knowing how
to deal with it as a funeral and you're just like,
I don't know what to say, everyone's so uncomfortable and
just validating Is that to me is what anyone would
(57:07):
actually want. It's what I always want when when I'm
in paying, I don't need you to tell me the
silver lining because like sometimes there's not that's right, not
everything that silver lining, It just loucks. And like this
is the thing is like we get so nervous and
so bent out of shape. Was like, oh, I don't
want to say the wrong thing, Like I have to
say this. I have to make it better for them.
(57:27):
Like your job as a friend or a support person
is not to make people feel better, It is to
make them feel heard. The cool thing is that that
is a lot easier than making somebody feel better. All
you have to do is say this sucks and there's
nothing that I can say that makes it better. But
I'm here and I love you. Yeah, that is way
easier than like, okay, let me make sure that I
(57:49):
say exactly the right thing and then remind them that
life will be better again and they'll find somebody new
and it will all be okay. Like that is so
much more effort and it does not work. Actually you haven't.
It makes it work. So you have an opportunity here
to do to try less hard for better outcome. So
let's do that. Yeah, it just feels weird because we're
(58:09):
not used to it, right, Yeah, well you mentioned earlier. Um,
it's about knowing, you know, when you're in the grief.
It's about knowing how to help yourself in those moments,
the tools that we have within those moments. So I
feel like this is a good time to talk about
your book. So the book is called It's Okay Not
to Be Okay, tell us a little bit about the book. Yes,
(58:30):
so it's okay that you're not okay. Um, it is
a really awesome book, So let's just start there. I
love that book and and because I study like how
humans are, Like the first part of the book really
goes into that cultural avoidance of grief. It's like the
sociological study of how did we get where we are
(58:52):
and how do we move forward? Now, what I very
often say, and I say it in the book is
if loss just happened for you, if your person just died,
or you just lost this relationship, or like grief is
fresh and raw for you, you don't care about the
cultural significance of grief. Right. I'm an anthropologist in a
and a sociology geek all over the place. But when
(59:14):
my partner first died, I didn't care about the historical
roots of pain avoidance, and that I wrote the book
in such a way that you can skip the entire
first part and get what you need right. But if
you do want to understand, um, how we got where
we are and how to get out of it again. Um,
it's a really cool exploration of all the different ways
(59:36):
that that avoidance of being human shows up in different
parts of life, culture, UM, entertainment, world, all of these things.
And then the other two thirds of the book, Um,
the middle part is about you know, what are the
tools that you actually need inside grief? How do you
distinguish between pain and suffering? How do you reduce suffering
(59:58):
by communicating your needs, by getting help with your anxiety,
or with things that you can do to help yourself
sleep or rest better. Like the tools that we have
for managing grief are actually much more helpful if you
look at them as how do I reduce my suffering
instead of how do I make my grief go away?
So that middle part of the book is about the
(01:00:20):
difference between pain and suffering and what tools do we
need to to meet each part of that? How do
you support yourself inside pain itself? And how do you
decrease your suffering where you can? And then the last
part of the book is really aimed at friends and
family members and supporters who want to do things better.
It does go back into like, there's a reason why
(01:00:40):
you don't know how to do this. It's cool, it's
not your fault, but here's what you need to do differently.
I really wanted that part of the book. I wanted
grieving people to be able to hand the book to
their best friend or their mother in law and say,
I know you have the best of intentions, here's what
would be really helpful for me, So like read this
section I wanted. I mean, if you start telling your
(01:01:04):
mother in law why your grief is valid and why
they're supporting you all wrong, Like, that's not going to
go well for you. I'm not gonna go well for you.
But if you put that information in the mouth of
an expert air quotes here, UM, I think it makes
it easier to to re educate, redirect train the people
(01:01:24):
who really wanted to really want to be of help
to you. Um, if you let somebody else describe the
problem for you, right, so that last part of It's
Okay is really about UM helping your support teams really
deliver the love and support that they intend to give,
because good intentions are a thing. We want our person
(01:01:45):
to feel loved and supported by what we're saying. The
unfortunate thing is that all of the ways that we've
been trained to support somebody are wrong. They're not effective,
and they're hurting people. They're causing damage. So we need
to unlearn all of those things and learn better ways
(01:02:05):
to really deliver that love we intend, so that that
last part of the book is really about undoing what
you've been taught and teaching how to do it better
and differently. UM. And it also talks about the importance
of community. I think we've said this several times together
today is community is our survival, right. We survive impossible
(01:02:25):
things together, right, we it's just the reality of being mammals, right,
Like we need each other to survive. There's a there's
a reason why in a lot of in a lot
of old traditions, like if you go against the rules
of the society, you get excommunicated, right, and literally one
of the rituals there is like the whole community stands
(01:02:48):
in a circle with the person who's screwed up in
the middle, and one by one each person in the
community makes eye contact and turns their back. Like. That
is powerful. And what this says is that, like you
did something so wrong, you are on your own in this.
So if we flip that, we say that, Um, you know,
(01:03:09):
I'm not sure my analogy is landing here. But like
survival relies depends on connection, and the absence of connection
is how we get lost. Right, you asked me earlier,
like what's dangerous inside grief? And what's dangerous inside grief
is isolation, right, it is feeling abandoned. That's different than
(01:03:34):
what we talked about a minute ago with with truly
being intimately alone with yourself and your grief. Being isolated
in your grief is what makes an unbearable situation impossible. Right,
So that part of the book is really about acknowledging
our needs for companionship and connection and talking about better
(01:03:57):
ways to get that companionship that we needed for our
own survival. Um, It's Okay has been out for I
think for four or so years now, and in the
realm of nonfiction books and then specifically in the realm
of grief. I remember when my agent and I we're
shopping for a publishing home for It's Okay, and a
(01:04:18):
lot of the big houses said nobody, grief books don't
sell nobody, nobody reads them. And my clap back was always,
that's because grief books suck. Yeah, So much of our
literature around grief, it it has been changing lately, but
so much of our literature around grief is um putting
a pretty bow on things that don't deserve a pretty bow.
(01:04:40):
It it puts a high spin gloss on things. Most
of our grief literature prioritizes a return to happiness and normalcy,
and that is just not the reality for most people. Um.
It turns out that telling the blunt truth about grief
means something two people. So you know people by It's okay,
by the case slow to deliver to hospitals and hospice organizations.
(01:05:04):
And I just I love that about the work is
that UM, telling the truth seems too simple to be
of use, But it turns out that telling the truth
about grief is actually what people need and it's really powerful. Well,
as you're saying that, I was thinking the last thing
that someone going through grief needs is shame at all
that And so if you are reading a book that's
(01:05:26):
like you'll get over this in this amount of time,
yet you're not, or you know, like they're mapping it out,
and that's not with the way your life looks. That
would for me produce so much shame. So then not
only am I sad and grieving and in pain, I
feel terrible about the human that I am because I'm like, well,
why can't I bounce back like everyone else is bouncing back? Yeah,
And that's the that's the real danger of that cultural
(01:05:49):
narrative of of happiness as the baseline of health, right
that a positive outlook is the only possible outlook and
everything else is you know, you're just being a jerk.
It makes normal, healthy people feel like they're failing on
top of the grief that they're actually feeling. So they're
shame in there. There's judgment in there, there's the past
(01:06:11):
fail for the human heart. There is a right way
and a wrong way to do this. And if you're
not back to normal and happy and having a positive
outlook and being grateful for what you've still got, if
you're not doing all that performative happiness ship real soon
like two weeks, ten days, six months, then you're failing.
And so then you can internalize that failure and feel like,
(01:06:32):
not only am I in pain, but I'm sucking this up.
Or you can feel really defensive right and start trying
to defend your grief to yourself and to other people,
which we've talked about earlier. UM So it's either like
you collapse in the face of shame and judgment or
you um roar into defending yourself. And neither of those
(01:06:53):
are places that I want somebody whose life just dissolved, like,
I just want you to have the luxury to feel
whatever you feel and be supported inside it. Right, Let's
not pile shame onto that. Let's not pile on the
need to defend yourself, right, and then to to to
go back to the tools that you were talking about.
(01:07:13):
So the the book that comes out in May is
a guided grief journal. It's called How to Carry What
Can't Be Fixed. It really drills into what are the
tools that you can use inside grief itself to help
you manage the um support yourself inside the immovable pain
that you're feeling, and also what are the tools that
you can use to help decrease your suffering. Right, So
(01:07:35):
it builds on some of the exercises that are in
It's Okay. There's UM some guided writing prompts. I am
super super picky about writing prompts as they relate to
grief because so often, um they feel really sort of
boring to me, like tell us about the funeral, Like
that's not really how I roll. So the writing prompts
in in this guided journal are are a little bit deeper.
(01:07:58):
It's a lot more, a lot deeper than those sort
of standard tell us about the funeral prompts. And it's
it's not a journal to solve grief for you, because
that is not how I work. It is a a
place for you to tell the whole truth about your grief,
whatever that looks like for you. And there are also
you know, echoing sort of the shape of It's Okay.
(01:08:20):
There are also there's also a whole section of UM
resources that you can print out or tear out of
the book and photocopy so that you can hand resources
to your nosy neighbor who really wants to be helpful,
or your best friend, you're your best friend who really
truly wants to show up for you. And how so
all of these um educate your friends and family resources
are in the journal as well. UM, because again, like
(01:08:45):
when your life just dissolved, I don't want you having
to do the work to educate the people around you.
That is my job, right, that's my job and my
team's job to make things easier for grieving people by
educating the world around them so that all you have
to do is fall apart. Well, I saw that there
was a link in the in your bio on your
Instagram to that UM the Grief Journal, but I'm also
(01:09:07):
going to link both of those in the description of
this podcast so that you guys can easily find them.
Thank you so much. I just love the truth about pain.
I like people to speak openly, so that again, to me,
that feels connecting, you know, that connects me with other
humans to hear about their truth. And just with the
walk not being so pretty imperfect, you know, I really
(01:09:29):
hope that we can let some of those guards down
after a year like we've had exactly, and that like
telling the truth is a relief, yeah right, it's actually
it's an awkward and gentle act and to loop back
to where we started right like you were talking about
I don't I'm going to analyze this so that I
(01:09:51):
never feel this again, and and really like, that's not
the way forward. The way forward is I'm going to
feel this in different ways again and again and again.
And that is part of loving the world, That is
part of being human in this world. It will happen again.
And what do I need to know now to support
(01:10:14):
myself when grief comes back again? Because it will? Right, Yeah,
that one, I'm gonna have to sit with that one
for a minute. Yeah, it's hard. It's a hard one,
I really do. I really feel like, but it's it's
hitting me. It's resonating for sure. Megan, thank you so much.
I really appreciate this. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you guys
so much for listening. Thanks for listening to The Velvet's
(01:10:36):
Edge podcast with Kelly Henderson, where we believe everyone has
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